David and Beulah Bulkley and the Creation of City Union Mission Centennial Celebration in September

David Bulkley, a Kansas City Methodist minister and social worker, in 1923 began telling his wife about his “terrible compulsion from God.” 

This apparently divine impulse, he explained, drove him to more directly serve what he called “God’s human sparrows.” Those were the broken individuals he could see from his office window sprawled out or sleeping, defeated on the sidewalks of Kansas City’s North End. They were deserving, he believed, of his own prayerful intervention. 

He was already doing this as social and religious work director at the Helping Hand Institute, a relief organization that offered beds, meals and chapel services five days a week to those without homes or resources. 

Even so, he felt he needed to leave his steady job and start a new street-level ministry. 

But there was still more. 

He asked his wife Beulah what he thought of selling their northeast Kansas City home and, taking along their 4-year-old daughter Ruth, moving to the “Skid Row” district of the North End, known for its lodging houses, saloons and brothels. There they could personally attend to what Bulkley, according to one family memoir, called “the poor families and the throng of forgotten men for whom nobody seems to care.” 

A few days later Beulah wrote to her mother in Louisiana. 

“Dear Mamma, David Bulkley has lost his mind,” she wrote. “Please send money. Ruth and I are coming home.” 

Such could be the price if David followed through on his compulsion. 

“My grandmother called it my grandfather’s obsession,” said Beth Liebling, one of the six grandchildren of David and Beulah, and a retired City Union Mission staff member. 

Life’s Other Side 

Ultimately Beulah agreed to her husband’s plan, although it was not an immediate decision. And while City Union Mission now has served as an enduring Kansas City agency helping those in need for 100 years, its founding was not inevitable.  

Diary entries by Beulah and letters written by David today document personal challenges over several preceding years.  

Those included: 

• David’s close-to-exhaustion reaction to his duties as a Young Men’s Christian Association chaplain during World War I. 

• Several miscarriages suffered by Beulah, whose doctor had advised that without her undergoing a surgical procedure she could be left an invalid. 

• The 1918 death of their infant son. 

• And, finally, a faith-testing moment for David who – upon hearing the news of the necessary surgery — fell across the foot of their bed and wondered aloud why God was making such demands of him. 

“I don’t understand it,” he said, according to “I Never Asked for the Easy Way,” a 1999 book by Juliana Vanderberg-Rohlfing, also a Bulkley granddaughter. 

Still, the family sold their home and in September 1924, opened the mission that next month will mark its centennial. 

Organizers have advertised a Sept. 15 fundraiser with a “Roaring Twenties” theme, suggesting guests dress accordingly. 

Personal income for working Americans increased some 24% during the 1920s, contributing to the rise of a new consumer economy. 

One specific standard of measure of that, as described by Rick Montgomery and Shirl Kasper in their 1999 book, “Kansas City: An American Story,” was the local beauty parlor index. The number of such businesses grew in Kansas City from 26 in 1923 to 223 in 1926 — a 757% increase. 

In 1923 one of those parlors had opened in the new Country Club Plaza, the posh shopping center north of where real estate developer J.C. Nichols was marketing homes in his fledgling Country Club District. By 1924 more than 300 families had gotten homesites in Nichols’ new Armour Hills subdivision. 

That same year an unknown number of families were living on life’s other side — the grim district of despair Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams later would sing about. 

If the 1920s today seem a time of widespread plenty, about 60% of families during that decade earned less than $2,000 a year, an income level the recently established Bureau of Labor Statistics classified as the minimum needed for a family of five. 

It’s unknowable today to estimate the resources available to those families who then lived in hovels constructed from trash pit debris in and around Kansas City’s East Bottoms. 

David Bulkley knew those subdivisions. 

In one diary entry, Beulah described the “most dreary neighborhoods” her husband frequented, sometimes bringing her and their pre-school daughter with him. 

“I had Ruth in my lap,” Beulah wrote. 

“No one was in sight, so David went into a rundown shack to find out if anyone was home. Crowded into the room built of tin and other material picked up from the city dump, the whole family huddled around a little stove.” 

Some 10 years before workers employed by Kansas City’s Board of Social Welfare, considered the country’s first such municipal agency, had documented similar dwellings. They also found entire North End neighborhoods without access to clean drinking water. 

In 1916 the Helping Hand Institute installed a water fountain outside its 408 Main St. Door. One sweltering day an estimated 5,000 people lined up there. 

Soon after it opened the City Union Mission installed a drinking fountain outside its own door, one block south at 545 Main St. 

The Bulkley family, meanwhile, had moved into their North End apartment. 

Years earlier David and Beulah had imagined an easier path. 

In 1915 he distributed flyers advertising himself as available to work “Tabernacle, Tent and Individual Church Meetings.” The following year he married Beulah Loyd, a graduate of the Meridian Female College School of Expression in Mississippi. In 1915 she had toured Texas as a storyteller and reader for a traveling chautauqua company. 

Before World War I their plans had included the possibility of him becoming a less nomadic preacher, maybe a pastor with his own congregation.  

Their first son, David Loyd Bulkley, had been born in January 1918, while Bulkley was overseas in France. 

Maybe, after the war, they thought David could work a plot of land. Beulah’s parents lived on a Louisiana sugar cane plantation. 

“In his letters from the war, he talked about coming back to farm,” said Dan Doty, City Union Mission executive director from 1992 through 2020. 

Then David Bulkley saw the trenches. 

Ministering to the ‘Unchurched’ 

His letters from France, while including occasional reveries of a bucolic future, also were vivid with the visceral realities of a chaplain’s obligations outside the chapel. 

By September those included ministering to soldiers but also walking for hours before sunrise, carrying litters used to carry the expected wounded, and being sufficiently close to harm’s way to come upon those same wounded, as well as the dead. Sometimes Bulkley wrote of collecting the canteens of fallen Americans to give to those who were still ambulatory. 

On one such night he believed he experienced both despair and divine solace within moments of one another.  

In one letter, David described a pre-dawn march when he noticed his canteen was missing its cork, as well as about one-third of its water. 

“I dare not drink,” he wrote, describing his panic of the moment. “It may be a day before I could get more.” 

But a timely rain shower began that he deemed heaven-sent. 

“Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it by life or death,” he wrote, referencing a verse from the Book of Philippians. 

“I bit a small piece of bread but water I dare not use, so I held up my left hand and caught the drippings from my helmet. I became a new man.  

“You say to me, what did I think? Or rather, what were my thoughts? 

“I saw beauty and glory. I saw hell and demons.” 

He returned from France soon after, at about the same time his son, whom he had never seen, died in the influenza epidemic. 

“He gets off the train and his wife is there but without their son,” said Terry Megli, current mission executive director. 

Four months later David signed on at the Helping Hand Institute, located near Fifth Street and Grand Avenue. 

There was no ignoring what was visible from his desk. 

“Once he started at Helping Hand, he would look out the window and see all the people on the streets, and it just broke his heart,” Doty said. 

Over time he began to describe his compulsion to Beulah. 

“It was some kind of epiphany, something that had moved him strongly, something he believed God wanted him to do,” Liebling said. 

The couple went back and forth over this. But David’s distress upon hearing the news of Beulah’s possible surgery had its own effect on her. 

“My stubbornness, my arrogance and my pride suddenly melted away,” she later wrote. 

“She decided that if God would let her get over her illness and be able to walk, she would put her heart into it,” Liebling said. 

David resigned his position at Helping Hand. 

The Bulkleys took a six-month lease at 545 Main St. With the rest of their savings, they invested in items useful in mission work, among them a speaking platform, a used piano, and 200 chairs. 

They opened on Sept. 15, 1924. Some 600 men, women and children showed up, Megli said. 

The mission’s incorporation papers detailed that it would serve “the unchurched families and men of the North Side.” 

Then, as now, the mission had no specific denominational affiliation. While the documents filed in Jefferson City listed an executive of the Church of the Nazarene, it also named as officers the operators of a printing company and an accounting firm, as well as the owners of local firms selling grain, fuel oil and furniture. 

Beulah’s health improved, Liebling said. Her doctor, meanwhile, forgave his fee after attending a mission service in November. 

“I cannot ask you to be indebted to me, when you are doing what you are for the cause,” wrote E. A. Reeves. 

Others would be inspired to donate as well. 

Those later would include Kansas City’s most high-profile madam. 

No Personal Names Mentioned 

Annie Chambers advertised. 

In 1932 she placed the same recurring classified ad in the Kansas City Star and Times announcing that every night at 8 p.m., she “would tell her life’s history and all of her memories” to all who paid a 50-cent admission price at her door at Third and Wyandotte streets. 

The ad promised “no personal names” would be mentioned. 

Charitable outreach by Kansas City faith communities goes back well before the 20th century. Many — among them Protestant, Catholic, Jewish — worked to weave together their own safety nets. 

Only City Union Mission, however, leveraged the legacies of Kansas City’s three most luxurious houses of ill repute in service of its own, quite different, calling. 

By the late 1930s, mission leadership had bought, leased or received all three buildings, all standing next to one another on or near Wyandotte Street between Third and Fourth streets. 

The mission moved into its first former bawdy house, known as Madame Lovejoy’s, in 1927 when another admiring local business owner, this one running a coffee company, rented the building to the Bulkleys at a friendly rate. He had bought the property as an investment.  

But after a few buyers appeared, he leased it to the Bulkleys. 

In what became their bedroom the Bulkleys discovered a trapdoor leading to a Prohibition-era wine cellar. A first-floor ballroom — highlighted by a frieze of dancing girls — the Bulkleys converted into a chapel. 

“That was our first overnight emergency shelter,” Megli said. “David Bulkley called it ‘The Harbor,’ a place of safety and refuge.” 

Soon the Harbor’s doorbell rang, and Beulah opened it for a woman who identified herself as one of the women working in the nearby building owned by madam Eva Prince. 

The woman had delivered an infant who had died. She asked if David Bulkley would conduct the funeral. 

“I am a bad woman, but my baby was never bad,” she told Beulah. 

“The casket containing ‘the innocent fruit of the not so innocent’ was set up in the chapel,” Beulah later wrote.  

David delivered the sermon. In 1929 the Bulkleys bought the Eva Prince building at a reduced price on the condition — requested by Prince — that if ever a woman would knock on the door, she would not be turned away. 

Soon the Bulkleys met the owner of the third brothel. 

Her name first had appeared in a Kansas City newspaper in 1869, when the Kansas City Journal included her as being among 20 “soiled doves” who that December appeared in “Recorder’s Court” to pay a $16 fine. The paper described the amount as both a “fine” and “fee” that allowed the women to continue pursuing what the newspaper described as their “lucrative means of support.”  

Recorders were city officials authorized to fine those they considered unscrupulous.  

Chambers routinely paid such fees over the subsequent decades for operating what the newspapers described as a “gilded palace of sin,” or “bagnio” or “maison de joie.”  

Police officers sometimes descended upon Chambers’ operation, in what the Kansas City Journal in 1871 described as their “periodical forays” into the prostitution district. 

But Chambers never seemed to be out of business for long. The house had operated from 1871 through 1913, according to the Star, meaning that for more than 40 years, Chambers had worked in plain sight. 

But by 1932 she was 90 years old and close to blind, her only significant financial asset was her 20-room property she then was running as a rundown rooming house. 

She had told the newspapers of her wish to sell it, suggesting a new nightclub could be successful at her well-known address. 

But after that idea had received little traction, she began telling her story every night at 8 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  

Beulah and Chambers soon met, with the latter asking the former to read biblical passages to her. 

Over time, Chambers told Beulah her own story. 

A married schoolteacher whose real name had been Leannah Loveall, she had endured the death of one child only to fall into a coma when expecting a second. She later woke from the coma to learn that her husband had died in a carriage accident. Then, her second child was stillborn. 

There later would be slightly different versions of the story, with the several different tragedies occurring in different sequences. 

But suffice it to say, done with the straight-and-narrow, Chambers had moved to Kansas City to start her own business. 

Given her growing relationship with the Bulkleys, she decided in 1934 to convert to Christianity and resolved to announce that in the most public manner possible. 

“She wanted prominent placement for her story,” said Megli. “She called the Star and said she had spent a lot of money in advertising.” 

The resulting article — an above-the-fold story in any newsroom — occupied most of the Sunday Star section front normally devoted to fashion and society news. 

The article, by A.B. MacDonald, the Star’s first Pulitzer Prize winner, quoted Annie as to how — when the Bulkleys’ funeral service for the deceased child began — she had stood at an open window and listened. 

“When they carried the baby out,” Chambers told MacDonald, “I could hear that poor mother weeping and I knew her own sorrow because, when I was a good woman and wife, away back there in the beginning of things. I had two babies of my own that died.” 

She credited the Bulkleys with her personal redemption, Chambers added, and said she would deed her former bawdy house to their mission. 

Beulah’s diary notes how she and David aided Chambers, sometimes referred to as “Anna,’ buying hose or underwear for her, or bringing her meals. 

From January 1934 through to Chambers’ death in March 1935, Beulah recorded brief notes detailing their visits as the end approached. 

January 24, 1934: “Anna medicine until 11 p.m.” 

February 2, 1934: “To Miss Anna’s for signing of deed etc.” 

February 15, 1934: “Interview with AB MacDonald Reporter for KC Star…” 

February 18,1934: “Front page article in the Star…Cars galore going by all afternoon…” 

January 6, 1935: “Miss Anna ill.” 

March 9, 10, 1935: “Miss Anna Very low!” 

Mach 20-23, 1935: “David Bulkley: ‘Want me to sing for you?’ Miss Anna: ‘Don’t ask foolish questions – sing.’“ 

March 24, 1935: “Miss Anna went to sleep at 7:10 a.m.” 

According to the Star, Chambers had been 92. 

The Far-fetched Movie 

On a recent afternoon, a beneficiary of City Union Mission’s car ministry received the keys to a 2006 Honda Civic. 

The 60-year-old, known as Joey, had come to the mission some 13 months before. His previous address, he said, had been a Sugar Creek encampment. 

But now he had just been hired as a maintenance supervisor at a nearby apartment building. The car ministry, the mission believes, better enables graduates of its long-term programs to access job interviews and find a path to steady employment. 

During the brief parking lot ceremony, Megli asked Joey what might have happened to him had he simply received a new apartment to escape the streets. 

“You might be happy for an hour, but you aren’t going to make it,” Joey said. 

While the mission’s website lists the cars distributed through its car ministry over the last year (13), as well as the number of meals served, (151,615) and the nights of shelter provided, (80,579), it also lists a number representing “Decisions for Christ,” (358). 

Today, at the mission’s Men’s Center at 10th Street and Troost Avenue, it offers classes in financial stewardship and vocational development as well as “Christ-centered counseling.” 

At its Women and Family Center, at 1310 Wabash Ave., the mission offers “Biblical Hospitality” that it believes, over an extended term, can provide women paths out of domestic violence, housing instability and addiction. Those committing to its “New Life Program” are offered the opportunity to attend Bible study along with health recovery skills classes, counseling and individualized case management. 

Religious instruction is not a prerequisite for receiving mission services, Megli said. 

“We are faith-based but not faith-required,” he added. “People don’t have to be a Christian to go through our programs. 

“But we want them to sample the Christian life and determine if that is what they want. That is what David Bulkley did, and that is what we do today.” 

Bulkley died in 1940 from a heart attack at age 62. 

In a 1940 diary entry Beulah had lamented her husband’s discomfort near the end, and wondered aloud why God wouldn’t ease his pain. 

Hearing that, David called Beulah over. 

“I never did ask for the easy way,” he said. 

Also, until the end, David never could understand how the more fortunate could not acknowledge the reality of those less so. 

In another 1940 diary entry Beulah described a visit to the Uptown Theater to see “The Grapes of Wrath.” They found themselves seated just behind two patrons who snorted at the film’s depiction of extreme want. 

“’This story is too far-fetched,’ one said,” Beulah wrote. “‘Those people eating from garbage cans — you know that’s just pure fiction in our land of plenty.’  

“David Bulkley could not stay silent.” 

Her husband, she wrote, reaching to touch the “fur-clad shoulder of the speaker,” said he could show her the places where families scavenged for food. When the woman demanded how he would know such things, Bulkley handed her his business card and invited her down to the mission. 

“I’ll take you with me when I go down to the Bottoms to distribute a carload of bread,” Bulkley said, “and you will see how they leave the garbage of the city dump and surround the car for bread.” 

Upon her husband’s death, Beulah began 14 years of serving as mission superintendent before retiring. 

In 1974 the Star, noting how all three brothels acquired by the mission long had disappeared, published an interview with Beulah. Just as her husband had — 34 years before at the Uptown — she insisted the poverty she once had seen in Kansas City had not been enhanced by Hollywood. 

“You just can’t imagine how bad it used to be in the North End,” she said. “I was so sorry for those people.” 

Beulah Bulkley died in 1980, at age 92. 

Flatland contributor Brian Burnes served as a Kansas City Star reporter from 1978 through 2016. 

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